Sapphire in petals “Bird” is such a touching story of growing up, told in four faces. Drama quartet. It's like a Rubik's Cube of colorful crystals.
This film is really young, because from a young movie we want exactly freshness, uncomplicatedness, lack of pretense and fawning compressions. Thanks to Vladimir Beck, who first decided to make something familiar. It was a rare drama of growing up, but nevertheless not the only one of this year. Andrey Zaitsev also presented his remarkable picture “14+” in this direction. It's like a renaissance of youth cinema, which is very nice. And then the domestic cinema almost twenty years did not allow the teenager to observe themselves, and adults said, they say, he is not interested, and decided again everything for him. And then they complain about the lack of independence of young people, which, however, I did not notice.
I will not retell, in this case it would be superfluous, because the whole picture is built on sensation, on color, on nostalgia. You see it not so much with your eyes as with your soul. Summer, children’s camp, first love – the first unrequited love, the first suffering, the first erotic experience, a magical ritual, feelings are connected, nerves are bare. It is not life itself, or even its semblance, so it is so easy to get lost in your own feelings. A hero is not a spectator. The viewer is definitely not confused here. I so liked the feeling of eroticism, not physiology, as often demonstrated by the world of teenagers, hormonal animals, not so much feeling as willing. Here desire is a dream, unrealizable, distant, shrouded in fear. The teenager is still afraid to lose the privileges of childhood, anticipating how long this wonderful uncertainty will last. In contrast to their eroticized, sharpened but still chaste world, adults fake intimacy with sex and do not find what they were looking for. It's kind of a switch. We want to be loved so much that we forget to love in return. We adults. At least some adults, but already caught in this trap.
I think that the bird that appears in the film is a kind of tribute to Tarkovsky’s Mirror, not even to the picture itself, but to its confessional beginning in anticipation of the end. After all, we were all once fourteen, and here the counselor sings so piercingly to the guitar, and the stars shine with a sapphire shine over our heads.
8 out of 10